Ready For My Closeup, Mr. Google

Meghann Marco (left) is so enthusiastic about Google Print she asked her publisher, Simon & Schuster, to submit her humor book, Field Guide to the Apocalypse, to the program because Google is “the primary way that people find their way to my website, and subsequently, my book.” Little did she know when she made that request that S&S is one of the five companies involved in the lawsuit filed yesterday against Google, and, as she reports on her home page, they told her there was no way people were going to be able to find advice on subjects like “how to convert your 70′s muscle car to run on bathtub gin” as long as they had anything to say about it. (from BoingBoing)

CLARIFICATION: Marco wanted to get her book into the basic Google Print program, while the AAP’s lawsuit against Google is specifically aimed at thwarting the Google Print Library. An anonymous reader tells us, “The publisher program does have promotional value; it’s essentially ‘look inside the book’ for Google. The lawsuits about the library program are really about whether ‘opting out’ is an appropriate way to handle copyright issues. Obviously publishers disagree—if they were forced to opt out of every database that decided to scan their work, their electronic copyright would be rendered meaningless. Google’s defense is that it’s too much work to get permission from everyone, and that the only way to do it is to to use an opt-out system. This is a spammer’s argument. Google suggests that the necessities of technology gives them permission to scan and copy everything if it makes their index more robust, but this isn’t the case.”

“The question of whether what Google is doing actually constitutes fair use is where it gets interesting,” this source adds. “It’s a tree in the woods argument. If a book is copied but someone only reads three lines of it, was the copyright violated? I think publishers have a strong case that it is a violation: if they own electronic rights, they also own the digital array of words that make up a book, and no one should be allowed to build products based on those words without securing permission beforehand, even if the end user only sees a sliver of the book.”

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